What Did Brooklyn Bridge Park Get So Right?

A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines. [Curbed]( wednesday, july 3 street view [What Did Brooklyn Bridge Park Get So Right?]( Nearly 20 years after we broke ground, it’s more impressive than ever. Photo-Illustration: Elizabeth Felicella/Etienne Frossard/Monacelli images Improbably, Brooklyn Bridge Park exists. That’s not an outcome I would have bet on a couple of decades ago when the waterfront below Brooklyn Heights was a DMZ of flat, hard wharves that spoiled otherwise glittering views of New York Harbor. Even more miraculous, the park is an 85-acre civic masterpiece. Ambling through curtains of thick, dark vegetation that open suddenly onto the high drama of the Manhattan skyline, I find it hard to remember a time when the only greenery here consisted of tenacious weeds. The park spent a decade as a sketch of itself, even as its various piers and parts revealed themselves in a tantalizing, frustrating sequence of openings. Finally, a long stretch of nothing happening, of innumerable plans, trade-offs, controversies, objections, and delays — that whole impasto of New York–style dithering — has been overwhelmed by the vivid, sensual presence of one of the city’s great public spaces. On a hot June afternoon, I watched children roll down a grassy incline and marveled at the huge effort of imagination that was needed to look at all that abandoned concrete and in its place conjure hills, dales, bowers, meadows, and wetlands. Credit for summoning them all into being goes largely to MVVA, a team of landscape architects led by Michael Van Valkenburgh, which has just published a justifiably [self-congratulatory book]( about the process of getting so many decisions right and so few wrong. [Continue reading »]( [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( The Latest [A Pinwheel House From a Frank Lloyd Wright Disciple The New Canaan four-bedroom also has stained-glass ceilings and lots of built-in seating.]( By Kim Velsey [Becoming Karl Lagerfeld Feels Just Like Disco-Decadent Paris Did to Me “Cinema can’t be satisfied with historical reality,” says the production designer on the Hulu series.]( By Wendy Goodman [Ikea Will Try (for the Third Time) to Open a Manhattan Store Three previous mini-stores, like your Lack coffee table, fell apart after only a couple of years.]( By Christopher Bonanos [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( [Read More From Curbed]( [Sign up to get The Listings Edit](, a weekly digest of the most worth-it apartments in New York. [GET THE NEWSLETTER]( [logo]( [facebook logo]( [instagram logo]( [twitter logo]( [unsubscribe]( | [privacy notice]( | [update preferences]( This email was sent to {EMAIL}. Was this email forwarded to you? [Sign up now]( to get this newsletter in your inbox. [View this email in your browser.]( You received this email because you have a subscription to New York. Reach the right online audience with us For advertising information on email newsletters, please contact AdOps@nymag.com Vox Media, LLC 1701 Rhode Island Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036 Copyright © 2024, All rights reserved